Are the reality show’s ubiquitous shirtless scenes a strange sign of progress?

One thing to know about The Bachelor, should you have thus far — by some miracle! — avoided its addictive vortex of tawdry love, is that its male protagonists are shirtless. A lot.

The sheer volume of shirtlessness — often captured in hilariously gratuitous steamy shower scenes (like the one below) — has even become something of a running gag; an in-joke among producers and audience alike.

On the premiere episode of last season’s TheBachelor, for instance, star Juan Pablo Galavis met up with former contestant Sean Lowe, the undisputed king of perpetual half-nakedness. In the midst of Lowe providing some enlightening advice to Galavis, the shirts on both men magically disappeared. The none-too-subtle suggestion? If you want to be The Bachelor, you better get ready to bare all . . . at least from the navel up.

This season’s Bachelor star, studly Iowa farmer Chris Soules, has already proudly joined the shirtless fray. In the premiere episode, Soules was shown working out with personal trainer and former contestant Cody Sattler. A photo of Soules in his post-workout state was circulated to news outlets, which ran shameless, tingle-inducing (and highly clickable!) headlines like “Chris Soules, Shirtless and Sweaty: See The New Pic.” It’s also surely no coincidence that producers made sure to point out in the very first episode that Soules has an outdoor shower at the mansion he’s staying in. (Let the shower-ogling trope begin!)

Amid all of this, is of course an utter lack of surprise; after all, the program’s audience skews heavily female, and there’s nothing like a half-naked beefcake to elicit interest from heterosexual women watching at home.

The show is, in this sense, a refreshing change of pace from a television landscape predominantly focused on sexually objectified women. In fact, this ostensibly silly reality TV show can be seen as a key player in a larger cultural movement to embrace a powerful, infrequently represented concept: the female gaze.

The Rise Of The Female Gaze

The idea of the male gaze first rose to prominence in Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which posited that, because most films (and TV shows) are helmed by heterosexual men, they tend to sexually objectify women, lingering over exposed body parts as a form of patriarchal voyeurism. In the film and television industry, there’s been a recent effort to subvert this paradigm and embrace instead the female gaze, turning men into sexual objects and women into voyeurs.

“No one does sex for women well—not in film and not on TV. Women are accustomed to seeing distorted images of themselves reflected back by way of the male gaze, but media that operates from the nexus of a woman’s desire is still so rare. We’re essentially inventing the female gaze right now—not just myself, but also showrunners like [Orange is the New Black creator] Jenji Kohan. We’re trying to show sex and desire from a female vantage point, and my ultimate hope is that I can inspire women, queer and trans people everywhere to join in and tell their truths about desire, identity and sexuality from unconventional perspectives.”

The new film Wild also garnered attention for a scene in which its female protagonist gazes upon a man bathing in a lake. As Variety put it, the scene was “a rare example of the female gaze at work in American movies.” The movie was, notably, produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Pacific Standard production company, which is explicitly devoted to creating female-driven material.

The Bachelor, of course, is hardly the bastion of feminism ideals that Wild, Orange is the New Black, orTransparent are. In fact, the show — helmed by the controversial Mike Fleiss — has faced justified criticism for its misogynistic overtones. Plus, one could read its shirtless scenes as not so much a subversion of the male gaze, as a different take on it.

In a piece for Jezebel, Dodai Stewart wrote about the key difference between the male and female gaze:

“[T]he objectification of men is a false equivalency to the objectification of women, because what’s being fetishized is strength. Virility, capability, vigor, fortitude. Power. In a world where men actually do have power. You can’t say the same about the standard objectification of women, which usually revolves around sexually-charged parts like breasts and buttocks, not biceps. In addition, “sexy” images of women generally involve us being relaxed, lying down, finger in the mouth like a child. Submissive, pliant, docile.”

Certainly, this judgment holds true for The Bachelor, where the shirtlessness of the men plays up strength and virility, while the sexual objectification of the female contestants is derived from docility and submissiveness. Last week’s episode of The Bachelor, for instance, featured female contestants literally walking through the streets of L.A. in bikinis, passively being ogled at by passerby. Later, a separate group of women went to a zombie paintball park, where — in trademark sexy shorts and dresses — they cowered and screamed.

Still, it’s hard not to see some value, however tenuous it may be, in The Bachelor‘s fondness for exposed pectorals and glistening abs. The sheer ubiquity of the male shirtlessness — and the often-cheeky way in which it’s presented — invites female viewers to serve not as sexual object, but as sexual subject, gazing and ogling with glee.

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Erin,
What I would like couldn’t be of lesser importance in the grand scheme of things. (Except, perhaps, a tiny fragment of attraction directed my way…)

I just acknowledged that the author for Jezebel got it all backwards, and that the key difference between the male and female gaze is in reality non-existent! To me, they both seem to coexist in being strong proponents of the traditional gender roles on both sides.

@Jezebel:
““[T]he objectification of men is a false equivalency to the objectification of women, because what’s being fetishized is strength. Virility, capability, vigor, fortitude. Power.”

However true this is, unfortunately (for feminists) The Rise of The Female Gaze does nothing to eradicate our current gender roles. Because the very thing that is objectified goes straight along with the traditional manly-man ideal…

What current gender roles would you like eradicated? Because it appears to me that in a lot of male-dominant entertainment, men love to uphold stereotypes about both tradtitional men and traditional women ideals. Alot of male-dominant entertainment very popularly makes strong manly-men and submissive, happy easily led around beautiful sexy young women the norm.

I, for one, welcome this “new” female gaze. I’ve always gotten the impression that the male body was almost assaultive to the female eye, particularly if a man was dressing and/or acting in a way as to draw attention.

I personally never got the whole male gaze thing – I disagree with feminists on that one because I’m always checking out guys’ package. Like always. Even the ugly ones. I hope it’s more common for women than we think. If not, maybe the problem is with them feeling too ashamed to look (self slut-shaming mentality, maybe?). I do agree with what a lot of what feminism believes, so this is in no way bashing them as a whole just because I don’t agree with this one.

I miss the 70s, when it was openly acknowledged that women looked at men and liked it when men looked sexy. I’m thinking of the nearly-unbuttoned shirts, the jeans so tight you could tell what religion men were, long flowing manes, hip-thrusting dance moves…
Whoo. I better stop there…

Objectification is objectification. Male, female, trans, whatever. Reducing a complex individual to what it is we need them to be. Call it what it is. Embrace it if you choose to, have fun with it if you choose to, just don’t pretend that whom ever is doing the gazing can give it a pass/fail.

I think the main point here is that it’s not so much yhe sexual objectification of men that is being touted as all in all that is as shallow and fleeting as the objectification of women and of youth in general.

I believe the real issue is the men strong and virile, women weak and needing me to protect her message being perpetuated. Just from a different vantage point. Same old stereotypes, same old same old. That’s one of the reasons i have never eber watched this pap.

It seems to me, that a major difference between male and female gaze is that women find only the top-most 0.5% of men worthy of being gazed at (let’s be honest, how many men have those shredded abs?), whereas men like to gaze at basically any woman in a certain (generously defined) age and weight range. My girlfriend is watching a certain show on my country’s local tv now, which is similar to the Bachelor. It features two guys who last month won a casting show for fashion models, and two groups of girls called the guys’ harems, of which… Read more »

I actually see it the exact opposite of you Theorema. I find that women are judged way more critically for their bodies and looks. You are more likely to see very beautiful women on TV with average men or men much older than them, then you are the reverse. I believe this even mirrors in real life where you are significantly more likely to see a plain man with a beautiful or younger woman then the reverse as well. Men have the freedom to be of any age and body type and date beautiful women half their age. This is… Read more »

Erin, “I believe this even mirrors in real life where you are significantly more likely to see a plain man with a beautiful or younger woman then the reverse as well.” There are just about as many men as women to go around. Truth is that in any age bracket there’s usually about 5% more men than women, up until we’re closing in on retirement age where the men start to die off significantly faster than the women. So for any man you see with a younger woman, there is one single older woman, but also at an even higher… Read more »

Okay FlyingKal, you win. There are just as many men to go around. Except most of them want to date younger women then even their own peers. “Technically” , women have just as much freedom to date or dismiss any man on age and body type. Realistically and socially, women are held to a stricter standard around their age and bodies then men ever will be.

Yay, what’s the prize!? 😉 But seriously. I didn’t intend to “win” anything. Just pointing out that even IF any man 15-60 wanted to date a 20-year-old, they can’t, simply by virtue of numbers. There are by the very definition just as many men as women involved in (monogamous heterosexual) relationship anywhere, and thereby roughly an equal amount left out, save maybe for different reasons. So I just have a hard time seeing that either gender should have a significantly higher degree of freedom in that regard. (I also want to acknowledge that I sometimes regret to not have English… Read more »

Okay Flying Kal, so by default of there not being enough 20 year olds to go around for all the men of varying ages that want them, men must settle for women around their own age. Plus, they can always find what they really want online anyway. And that’s all we can hope for I guess in a world where most men are downloading images of women half their age anyway and stockpiling them on their desktops in folders labeled something inconspicuous like “mortgage” while their single or in monogamous relationships either way. Because today “monogamy” means having one partner… Read more »

Erin. (I wrote a longer answer to this yesterday, but it got lost somewhere, it seems. Oh well, at it again.) Okay, When you wrote in your previous posts about older men being with or dating younger women, I associated that you were talking about just dating or being in a relationship with someone. Walking around and “hitting” on people is of course another game altogether where the same “rule of numbers” obviously does not apply. But what do I know. I don’t have the habit of hitting on women in grocery stores or wherever I meet them. I haven’t… Read more »

I am having a hard time understanding what your point of view is here. You seem to think the problem is ‘solved’ simply because there aren’t enough hot young ladies to go around to all the men that really want them. I tried to explain why that isn’t really any better a situation for women anyway. As for porn, men turn to porn all the time whether they have a woman present or not. Any belief rooted in the idea that men only turn to porn when they don’t have a woman is one that sprouted from the times before… Read more »

I personally find very few men to be physically attractive just from a purely aesthetic point of view. And by that I mean, I rarely if ever notice a man and think “wow he’s attractive!” It just hardly ever happens. I don’t know if that’s typical of other women or not. But when I get to know a man, or even talk to him a little, I can develop an attraction based on his personality and demeanor, even if he’s short, fat or bald. I think that is a main difference between men and women. Men are attracted to women… Read more »

The problem here is that parading around in a bikini is assumed to be more passive and sexually charged than showing off biceps. Chucking on a bikini and strutting down the street in it can be pretty active, standing there flexing a muscle seems no more or less active, and biceps seem pretty sexually charged to me… Honestly I don’t see things this way, but I know I am in the minority. I think maybe the cultural codes are the problem, not necessarily what people are doing. Oh and the fact that men are t the helm of most artistic… Read more »

That is an important point! You often hear the complaint that female movie/comic super heroes are forced to look more sexy (and thus close to nude), while the male ones are free of that burden.

But the truth is, that the male ones are just as obliged to be sexy; only their sexyness is expressed by muscles and martial prowess. They don’t wear iron man armor and weapons and leather jackets because it is realistic and practical. They do because it titillates the audience the same way as when a female hero wears a skin-tight revealing costume.

Yes, that’s true. But in most super hero comic movies or books, men are masters of their own stories. They may have bulging muscles and unrealistic abilities, but we still get to see them as fully formed characters with complex character development. Most women in super hero comics are not as fully developed or fleshed out except for their bodies and reveling clothing. Their stories are often only in the story as a way to enhance the lead (usually and mostly) male character’s story. They are a prop to the lead male character’s story. While I agree that men are… Read more »

Josh, female gaze is good although we haven’t completely defined it yet. Male gaze is bad, see the patriarchy. So it’s kind of better since most men don’t mind the gaze (or are not aware of it) and most women don’t like it.

Is this sarcasm?
Patriachy? Do you believe in Santa Claus as we’ll?
Can you honestly say even most women don’t like the male gaze?
If so than why do women go to so much trouble.
I’m not against women checking out men.
Let’s not have a double standard though – after all that is sexism.
Or is it only sexist when men do it?

Maybe. Does it seem like sarcasm?
Patriarchy. (There is another r in patriarchy.)
Yes, but only when I’m Santa Claus.
Most women say they don’t like the male gaze. And I think…well, they say they don’t like the male gaze.
They say they go to so much trouble for other women. And I think…well (see above).
I’m against women checking out men unless they’re just looking and not ogling which is three seconds or more. But if they look for three seconds or more I really don’t care either.